Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
We study the semilinear equation
where $\Omega $ is an unbounded domain of the Heisenberg group ${{\mathbb{H}}^{N}},\,N\,\ge \,1$. The space $\overset{\circ }{\mathop{S}}\,_{1}^{2}(\Omega )$ is the Heisenberg analogue of the Sobolev space $W_{0}^{1,\,2}\,\left( \Omega \right)$. The function $f\,:\,\overset{-}{\mathop{\Omega }}\,\,\times \,\mathbb{R}\,\to \,\mathbb{R}$ is supposed to be odd in $u$, continuous and satisfy some (superlinear but subcritical) growth conditions. The operator ${{\Delta }_{\mathbb{H}}}$ is the subelliptic Laplacian on the Heisenberg group. We give a condition on $\Omega $ which implies the existence of infinitely many solutions of the above equation. In the proof we rewrite the equation as a variational problem, and show that the corresponding functional satisfies the Palais–Smale condition. This might be quite surprising since we deal with domains which are far frombounded. The technique we use rests on a compactness argument and the maximum principle.